On Sunday, in an exclusive interview
with Jonathan Karl of ABC News' "This Week," Cheney proclaimed his love
of torture, derided the Obama administration for outlawing the
practice, and admitted that the Bush administration ordered Justice
Department attorneys to fix the law around his policies.

"I was a big supporter of waterboarding," Cheney
told Karl, as if he were issuing a challenge to officials in the
current administration, including President Barack Obama, who said
flatly last year that waterboarding is torture, to take action against
him. "I was a big supporter of the enhanced interrogation techniques..."

The former vice president's declaration closely
follows admissions he made in December 2008, about a month before the
Bush administration exited the White House, when he said he personally
authorized the torture of 33 suspected terrorist detainees and approved
the waterboarding of three so-called "high-value" prisoners.

"I signed off on it; others did, as well, too," Cheney said
in an interview with the right-wing Washington Times about the
waterboarding, a drowning technique where a person is strapped to a
board, his face covered with a cloth and then water is poured over it.
It is a torture technique dating back at least to the Spanish
Inquisition.

The US has long treated waterboarding as a war crime
and has prosecuted Japanese soldiers for using it against US troops
during World War II. And Ronald Reagan's Justice Department prosecuted a Texas sheriff and three deputies for using the practice to get confessions.

But Cheney's admissions back then, as well as those
he made on Sunday, went unchallenged by Karl and others in the
mainstream media. Indeed, the two major national newspapers--The New York Times and The Washington Post--characterized
Cheney's interview as a mere spat between the vice president and the
Obama administration over the direction of the latter's
counterterrorism and national security policies.

The Times and Post did not report that Cheney's
comments about waterboarding and his enthusiastic support of torturing
detainees amounted to an admission of war crimes given that the
president has publicly stated that waterboarding is torture.

Ironically, in March 2003, after Iraqi troops
captured several U.S. soldiers and let them be interviewed on Iraqi TV,
senior Bush administration officials expressed outrage over this violation of the Geneva Convention.

"If there is somebody captured," President George W.
Bush told reporters on March 23, 2003, "I expect those people to be
treated humanely. If not, the people who mistreat the prisoners will be
treated as war criminals."

Nor did the Times or Post report that the "enhanced
interrogation techniques" Cheney backed was, in numerous cases,
administered to prisoners detained at Guantanamo and in detention
centers in Iraq and Afghanistan who we would come to discover were
innocent and simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The torture
methods that Cheney helped implement as official policy was also directly responsible for the deaths of at least 100 detainees.

Renowned human rights attorney and Harper's magazine contributor Scott Horton said,
"Section 2340A of the federal criminal code makes it an offense to
torture or to conspire to torture. Violators are subject to jail terms
or to death in appropriate cases, as where death results from the
application of torture techniques."

In addition to Obama, Attorney General Eric Holder said during his confirmation hearing last year that waterboarding is torture.

"Dick Cheney wants to be prosecuted. And prosecutors
should give him what he wants,"Horton wrote in a Harper's dispatch
Monday.

Karl also made no mention of the fact that the CIA's
own watchdog concluded in a report declassified last year that the
torture of detainees Cheney signed off on did not result in any
actionable intelligence nor did it thwart any imminent attacks on the
United States. To the contrary, torture led to bogus information,
wrongful elevated threat warnings, and undermined the war-crimes charges
against Mohammed al-Qahtani, the alleged "20th hijacker" in the 9/11
attacks because the evidence against him was obtained through torture.

Karl also failed to call out Cheney on a statement
the former vice president made during his interview in which he
suggested the policy of torture was carried out only after the Bush
administration told Justice Department attorneys it wanted the legal
justification to subject suspected al-Qaeda prisoners to brutal
interrogation methods.

Jason Leopold is Deputy Managing Editor of Truthout.org and the founding editor of the online investigative news magazine The Public Record, http://www.pubrecord.org. He is the author of the National Bestseller, "News Junkie," a memoir. Visit (more...)